Category / Advertising

Snapple has apparently ponied up to be the Official water, juice, and iced-tea provider for the city of New York. And only $166 Million took the contract! What a deal, though – only Snapple machines in schools, and in January machines in other city facilities. San Diego is sponsored for 12 years by Pepsi (for only $23.6MM), and East Lansing, Michigan, for 10 years by Coke (only $2MM).

Mayor Bloomberg is probably strutting his stuff right now over the $106MM he’s going to have in cash payments (the remainder is marketing). And the effects are already rolling in, with blogs like 601am.com changing their logo to fit in, since they’re located in NYC. [props to technorati cosmos]

On Friday, a U.S. District Court judge announced that adware is legal (specifically WhenU.com’s is discussed here). The question at hand is whether software installed on a web user’s computer is legally allowed to create a pop-up or pop-under that is “relevant” to the website(s) that the user is surfing on.

Gator, another purveyor of such software, had settled earlier with some newspaper sites it had been serving ads around.

This isn’t a good sign, though I can’t say that it’s *illegal*, per se, what these companies are doing. I just don’t like it.